How (not) to keep kids safe online
We’re 11.7% of our way through 2024…
There’s a category of media called “competence porn,” which is about the joy of watching an expert deploy their craft with extreme, weaponized competence. That happened last week when social media scholar danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, deftly explained what’s wrong with a proposed law that would force social networks to build parental controls.
“People who are obsessed with tech think that it will solve all.the.things™ and they are fools,” writes Boyd. “In all of these discussions [about keeping kids safe online] we keep centering technology. Technology is the problem, technology should be the solution. What if, instead, we focused on what challenges young people are facing? What if we actually invested in addressing the issues at the core of their anxiety, depression, and suicidality? What if we invested in helping those who are most vulnerable?”
Boyd’s referring to the Kids Online Safety Act, which was the subject of a Senate Judiciary Hearing the week before last (during which, incidentally, a senator from North Carolina asked the CEO of TikTok how WiFi works…). Fundamentally, this is a case of “solutionism” — the age-old human desire to try to find technological solutions to complex social problems. But the internet is just a mirror! It magnifies whatever’s not working (or working!) in culture and society at large.
What else we’re reading
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Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Struggling with procrastination? Give yourself permission to be inefficient: “Hours lost to goofing off are not as bad as days lost to avoidance.”
Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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